Narrative as Action

Didier Coste, through Narrative as Communication, rekindles the fundamental conversation about the nature of narrative not as a textual form but as an act of communication that organizes meaning and moves human beings to understand the world. He refuses to place narrative merely as a sequence of events or linguistic patterns and replaces it with the idea that every story is a process of meaning-production that builds a relation between sender, receiver, and the world they create together. Thus, narrative is not a result but a social action, not a lifeless object within a text but a way through which humans shape significance in time. From that point all of Coste’s thought revolves, questioning the old borders between literary studies, semiotics, and communication theory, and offering the view that to tell a story is the most complex form of thinking and relating.

For Coste, narrative is a communicative effect that arises when a message forms a worldview that is transitive, that is, directing one’s understanding toward change and interconnection in reality. He insists that there is no such thing as something essentially “narrative”; what exists are acts that generate narrative effects in the consciousness of the receiver. In this sense a story need not take the form of a long tale, because narrativity does not lie in the length of its structure but in the way meaning works, in the direction and communicative resonance that emerges from the message itself. A single sentence can be narrative if it leads the mind to trace cause and effect, time and change, action and consequence. With this perspective Coste shifts the center of attention from text to interaction, from structure to communicative event, and from form to social function.

Such a view unsettles the older confidence inherited from structuralism. In that older perspective narrative is a logical construction that can be mapped through a grammar of action, as done by Propp, Greimas, or Genette. Narratology was defined as the science of the structure and function of stories. But for Coste this approach loses its spirit because it observes only the shape of something already dead. He argues that what must be examined is not the structure that wraps events but the social and cognitive dynamics that make something become a story for someone. Hence the narratology he proposes is a communicational narratology, an attempt to understand how people use narrative forms to communicate, to persuade, to teach, to discipline, or to liberate. He wants to bring narrative back to the public sphere, to the social sphere, into the process of meaning exchange that truly happens between sender and receiver.

In this sense narrative penetrates the border between art and everyday life. In conversations, in news reports, in political propaganda, even in scientific formulas, there is a tendency to arrange experience into sequences of cause and effect. Coste regards this tendency not as a mere technique but as an existential need: humans organize the world in order to bear it. In every story that is told, there is an effort to conquer time, to manage change, and to affirm identity amid transience. Hence he says that narrative always contains a paradox: on the one hand it asserts change, on the other it safeguards continuity. This paradox is not a weakness but the source of narrative energy itself. Narrative animates experience because it unites motion and constancy, transformation and persistence, beginning and end, life and death.

That paradox is what makes narrative endlessly interpretable. Each time humans tell a story they repeat the same play between time and meaning. They speak of events that have passed, yet in that very act of speaking they create new events. They remember in order to transform, and transform in order to remember. For Coste, the act of storytelling is an effort to overcome the fear of mortality. Narrative names death with a thousand other words: ending, farewell, victory, liberation, union, or rebirth. In all stories lies a hidden desire to postpone death, to give meaning to loss. Therefore narrative becomes the primary way humans face time, and time itself can only be understood through the narrative forms they create.

Within this framework narrative cannot be separated from the ethics of communication. Every story carries responsibility, for it organizes the way people understand cause and effect in the world. When someone tells a story, they do not merely repeat facts but also structure the direction of meaning, deciding what is important, what must be forgotten, what must be remembered. Thus narrative always involves a moral decision: a decision about what to value, what to conceal, and to whom the meaning is entrusted. Here narrative becomes a form of social action. It is a strategy for arranging collective perception, shaping public consciousness, and guiding how a society views itself. Therefore Coste sees narratology not only as a branch of linguistics or aesthetics but as a study of human social life itself.

In the modern world Coste’s ideas find piercing relevance. When political, media, and economic discourses all turn into games of narrative, when truth competes with more entertaining constructions of story, his theory becomes a tool for examining how communication shapes social reality. He shows that narrative is never neutral: every story is a tool of power as well as of resistance. It can obscure reality but can also reveal it. It can hypnotize the masses yet also awaken awareness. What determines this is not the story’s form but the relation between sender, receiver, and the social structures through which the story circulates. In other words, narrative analysis must not stop at the text but trace the networks of communication that keep it alive.

Narrative works through mechanisms of circulation of meaning. In every communicative act, meaning is not produced solely by the sender but negotiated by the receiver. Coste rejects the view that meaning is content sent from one side to another. He sees it as the outcome of an encounter between what is uttered and how it is interpreted. For this reason he stresses the role of the receiver. Without the reader, listener, or spectator who responds, narrative does not exist. Every story, in Coste’s sense, lives in that transaction. Thus narrative analysis must involve three dimensions: production, exchange, and consumption of meaning. It is a symbolic economy in which the value of meaning is determined by social context and relations of power.

In this way Coste restores theory to life. He refuses to treat stories as static objects that can be diagrammed or reduced to formulas. Instead he affirms that every story is an open event, always changing according to the situation of communication. In reality, stories are not only told but also heard, repeated, interpreted, circulated, and used. This process involves language, technology, institutions, and the complex desires of humans. In Coste’s vision, narrative becomes the field where language, power, and time converge. It is a social laboratory where meaning is tested and recreated. To understand narrative, therefore, is to understand how humans negotiate with reality and with themselves.

Coste’s main intellectual courage lies in how he connects narrative with performative communication. He does not stop at analyzing what is told but at what the act of telling itself does. When someone tells something, they do not only describe the world but also create a new act: they attract attention, summon emotion, move decisions. This is the true power of narrative: it does not describe action, it is action. From here arises the insight that narrative is not only a way of thinking but a way of acting in the world. It does not merely represent reality but reorganizes it through imagination and communication.

This idea has vast consequences for how we understand the relation between literature, history, and politics. If narrative is the form of communication that constructs reality, then history cannot be separated from how it is told. Facts never stand alone; they gain meaning through narrative patterns that link cause and effect. Likewise in politics, policy and ideology derive force through persuasive stories. Even in science, discoveries and experiments are reported following a narrative logic: background, method, result, conclusion. Every discipline, therefore, operates through narrative. Coste seems to say that human beings are narrative creatures who communicate to build a world they can understand.

But Coste does not end with a celebration of narrative. He also warns of the danger when narrative becomes a mechanism of power that closes off other possibilities. When narrative is used to justify social orders or erase differences, it loses its communicative nature and turns into dogma. Hence narratology must always remain critical of how narrative works: it must expose who speaks, to whom, in what way, and for what purpose. Here narratology becomes an ethical discipline. It does not only analyze structure but also the communicative responsibility it bears. In contemporary society, where media produce narratives endlessly, this responsibility grows heavier. We must read not only what is said but also how and why something is said.

Coste’s theoretical strength lies in his view of narrative as a phenomenon that unites linguistic, psychological, social, and metaphysical dimensions. He does not separate textual structure from the structure of consciousness. He regards narrative as the way humans mediate the relation between self and world. In telling stories, people not only arrange experience but also form identity. They find themselves between what is told and what is heard. Thus narrative becomes the mirror through which humanity perceives its own being. Yet that mirror is not passive; it reflects images already shaped by language and desire. To understand narrative, therefore, is to investigate how language forms the subject. In communicative narrative, identity is always negotiated, never final, always open to new interpretation.

Such an idea opens paths for dialogue with other theories. Compared with reflections on time and narrative, Coste rejects the idea that narrative is merely a temporal configuration uniting beginning and end. He emphasizes instead the communicative function of narrative in producing social effects. Compared with structural semiotics that stresses the system of signs, Coste sees communication as a living practice involving power and emotion. In this he approaches a dialogical understanding of language: every utterance is a response to another and contains the potential to be changed by the receiver. Hence narrative is an endless conversation between sender, receiver, and the world they build together.

By focusing on communication, Coste returns narrative theory to concrete human experience. He realizes that in practice narrative always involves media. Words, images, sounds, and movements are the vehicles that make messages flow. Therefore technological changes in communication also transform how people tell stories. Television, film, social media, or digital games each follow different communicative logics. Yet the basic principle remains the same: narrative is an effort to organize experience into a form understandable by all. In a world saturated with data and speed, narrative becomes a tool to calm confusion. It provides structure for fragmented experience and gives direction for collective action. For Coste, to understand narrative is to understand how humanity survives in the endless flow of information.

From this perspective every public communication—from political speeches to advertisements—can be read as a narrative form that tries to build causal relations between desire and action. In advertising, narrative forms a logic that connects need with product. In politics, it links past, present, and future into a seemingly rational line. In science, it provides logical sequence that asserts objectivity. All this shows that narrative is the main framework of human rationality. It is how we give meaning to the world and how the world is arranged to be intelligible. Thus a critique of narrative is not a rejection of stories but an awareness that every story carries epistemological and moral implications that must be recognized.

Coste asserts that communicative narrative is always dialectical: it unites and separates sender and receiver at once. In every story there is distance, a space that makes interpretation possible. This distance makes communication possible, because without difference between what is said and what is understood, there would be no dialogue. Yet that distance can also produce distortion. Narrative can be misunderstood, manipulated, or turned into domination. Here critical awareness becomes essential. The reader or listener must not be a passive receiver but an active participant in meaning-production. Narrative lives only when reciprocal exchange occurs among those involved. Without it, communication becomes monologue, and narrative loses its social function.

A living narrative is always dialogic. It opens room for responses, questions, even refusals. In that process meaning keeps changing, renewed and contested. Coste calls this the openness of narrative: it is never complete because its meaning depends on ever-changing situations of communication. Each time a narrative is told, it is reborn in a new context. That is why the same story can be interpreted differently across time and culture. This openness is not weakness but the strength of narrative. It enables communication across time and space and makes narrative the principal medium of culture. Without this capacity, humanity would lose its way of understanding the past and imagining the future.

In Coste’s view, narrative not only unites time but also unites communities. When people share stories they build a sense of togetherness that cannot be reached by rational argument alone. Stories create emotional bonds, extend empathy, and shape collective memory. In this context narrative is a social glue. It bridges differences and creates a shared space where meaning is negotiated. Yet because its binding force is strong, narrative can also become a tool of exclusion. When a group monopolizes the story of the past or the future, it controls the direction of social communication. Hence to understand narrative is also to understand the politics of identity and memory. Every narrative of nation, religion, or history is a struggle over who has the right to tell the world.

Amid this complexity Coste invites readers to see narrative as a serious play between freedom and order. He is aware that humans need structure to make sense of experience, yet also need space to reinterpret it. Therefore narrative always lies between determination and possibility. It gives form to life, but that form is never final. In communicative action, narrative structure is only an initial frame that can be changed by interaction. Thus narrative becomes an experimental space allowing humans to train imagination, test new ideas, and challenge existing limits. Narrative is not a prison of meaning but a laboratory of freedom.

But this freedom does not come without responsibility. Because every narrative has social impact, both sender and receiver must be aware of its consequences. In a media-dominated world where stories can spread globally within seconds, this responsibility becomes heavier. False stories can spark hatred, while wise stories can build solidarity. Coste reminds us that narrative theory cannot be separated from the ethics of communication. It must help us distinguish between stories that liberate and those that oppress. The main criterion is not factual truth alone but how far a narrative opens space for dialogue, widens understanding, and nurtures social consciousness.

A good narrative, in Coste’s sense, is not the most polished or most moving but the most communicative—the one capable of balancing structure and freedom, form and response. Such a narrative fosters active participation and urges the receiver to interpret. It does not deliver final answers but ignites continuous conversation. In a world flooded with information, the ability to craft communicative narratives becomes a new form of wisdom. It teaches that speaking and listening are equally important, that meaning arises not from certainty but from the courage to interact.

Thus Narrative as Communication is not merely a theory of stories but a philosophy of human connection. It shows that every telling is an act of life, every narrative a negotiation with time, every interpretation a renewal of community. In Coste’s vision, to narrate is to live consciously in language, to converse with death without surrendering to it, and to recognize that meaning is never owned but shared. In that recognition lies both the fragility and the strength of being human. Narrative, finally, is the space where communication becomes existence itself, where to tell is to be, and to listen is to allow others to be.